Arthur Eddington Quotes

212 Sourced Quotes

We used to think that if we knew one, we knew two, because one and one are two. We are finding that we must learn a great deal more about 'and'.

Arthur Eddington
Proof is the idol before whom the pure mathematician tortures himself.

Arthur Eddington
I think there should be a law of Nature to prevent a star from behaving in this absurd way!

Arthur Eddington
An addition to knowledge is won at the expense of an addition to ignorance. It is hard to empty the well of Truth with a leaky bucket.

Arthur Eddington
In Einstein's theory of relativity the observer is a man who sets out in quest of truth armed with a measuring-rod. In quantum theory he sets out with a sieve.

Arthur Eddington
Nowadays whenever enthusiasts meet together to discuss theoretical physics the talk sooner or later turns in a certain direction. You leave them conversing on their special problems or the latest discoveries; but return after an hour and it is any odds that they will have reached an allengrossing topic - the desperate state of their ignorance.

Arthur Eddington
We have not to discover the properties of a thing which we have recognized in nature, but to discover how to recognize in nature a thing whose properties we have assigned.

Arthur Eddington
Where science has progressed the farthest, the mind has but regained from nature that which the mind has put into nature.

Arthur Eddington
The symbol A is not the counterpart of anything in familiar life. To the child the letter A would seem horribly abstract; so we give him a familiar conception along with it.

Arthur Eddington
In any attempt to bridge the domains of experience belonging to the spiritual and physical sides of nature, time occupies the key position.

Arthur Eddington
Wheresoever the carcass is, there will the eagles be gathered together, and where the symbols of the mathematical physicists flock, there presumably is some prey for them to settle on, which the plain man at least will prefer to call by a name suggestive of something more than passive emptiness.

Arthur Eddington
I am an Evolutionist, not a Multiplicationist. It seems rather stupid to keep doing the same thing over and over again.

Arthur Eddington
"A fortuitous concourse of atoms" — that bugbear of the theologian — has a very harmless place in orthodox physics.

Arthur Eddington
To imagine that Newton's great scientific reputation is tossing up and down in these latter-day revolutions is to confuse science with omniscience.

Arthur Eddington
It [the physical world is a thing; not like space, which is a mere negation; nor like time, which is — Heaven knows what!

Arthur Eddington
One of our ancestors, taking arboreal exercise in the forest, failed to reach the bough intended and his hand closed on nothingness. The accident might well occasion philosophical reflections on the distinctions of substance and void - to say nothing of the phenomenon of gravity.

Arthur Eddington
If indeed, the subatomic energy in the stars is being freely used to maintain their great furnaces, it seems to bring a little nearer to fulfillment our dream of controlling this latent power for the well-being of the human race — or for its suicide.

Arthur Eddington
Nature made nearly every possible mistake before she reached her greatest achievement, Man — or perhaps some would say her worst mistake of all.

Arthur Eddington
We have swept away the anti-chance from the field of our current physical problems, but we have not got rid of it. When some of us are so misguided as to try to get back milliards of years into the past we find the sweepings piled up high like a high wall, forming a boundary — a beginning of time — which we cannot climb over.

Arthur Eddington
A reasoned theory is preferable to blind extrapolation.

Arthur Eddington
The unanimity with which the galaxies are running away looks almost as though they had a pointed aversion to us. We wonder why we should be shunned as though our system were a plague spot in the universe.

Arthur Eddington
There are two parties to every observation - the observed and the observer.

Arthur Eddington
The super-system of the galaxies is dispersing as a puff of smoke disperses. Sometimes I wonder whether there may not be a greater scale of existence of things, in which it is no more than a puff of smoke.

Arthur Eddington
We walk the stage of life, performers of a drama for the benefit of the cosmic spectator. As the scene proceeds, he notices that the actors are growing smaller and the action quicker. When the last act opens the curtain rises on midgets rushing through their parts at frantic speed.

Arthur Eddington
We have certain preconceived ideas about location in space which have come down to us from ape-like ancestors.

Arthur Eddington
Our model of Nature... should be like an engine with movable parts. We need not fix the position of any one lever; that is to be adjusted from time to time as the latest observations indicate. The aim of the theorist is to know the train of wheels which the lever sets in motion — that binding of the parts which is the soul of the engine.

Arthur Eddington
I really cannot tell you anything about it, if you will not let me make measurements of any kind. Measurement is my only means of finding out about nature. I am not a metaphysicist.

Arthur Eddington
Our conception of substance is only vivid so long as we do not face it. It begins to fade when we analyse it. We may dismiss many of its supposed attributes which are evidently projections of our sense-impressions outwards into the external world.

Arthur Eddington
Between physics and philosophy there lies a debatable territory which I shall call scientific epistemology.

Arthur Eddington
Let the observer place himself so that he is, to the best of his knowledge, at rest. If he is a normal human being, he will seat himself in an arm-chair; if he is an astronomer, he will place himself on the sun or at the centre of the stellar universe.

Arthur Eddington